Stats Stuff – Iron Man Streak – Most Consecutive Games*

The Sydney Ice Dogs recently posted on social media that Daniel Pataky had re-signed with them for the 2022 season, and brought up the stat of his iron man streak – the number of consecutive games played.

This, obviously, got me thinking. How many games is his streak? And what is the League record?

This quickly became more complex that a quick SQL query. It took almost a day to figure out how to accurately determine what the record is, who has it and when they did it.

The process I settled on ran through the following steps in order:

1. Retrieve the player from the database
2. Determine when that player’s debut date was
3. Search the database from that date forward and find which team the player was playing on for that season
4. List through each of the games that team played in that season, from the debut date forward if appropriate
5. Find out if the player played in that game
6. Loop back to Step 3 until all years of their career had been completed or I reached the end of the 2019 season
7. If the player missed a game, the streak was broken and the counters would reset

This process is specifically built this way because, in a few short words, Joey Hughes.  Joey has played for the Ice, then Mustangs, then Ice again, then Brave.  If a player moved teams, the system needed to carry the streak across teams.  It also takes into account a player such as James Sanford, who played for both the Mustangs and Blue Tongues in 2012.  However, Sanford only played a single season, and even then missed a few games, so you will see he was out of contention from the outset, pretty much.

I built a script to interrogate my database en masse, and a secondary script to confirm individual players if I felt there were issues.  So I am pretty comfortable in presenting …

The Top Twenty Iron Man Streak Record Holders for the AIHL*.

Player Name	Streak first game	Streak last game	Games
Jordan Kyros	5 May 2012	14 May 2017	141
Kai Miettinen	29 Jun 2013	27 Aug 2017	125
Patrick O’Kane	20 Apr 2013	17 Jun 2017	123
Brian Funes	13 Apr 2014	26 Aug 2017	111
Samuel Wilson	5 May 2012	24 Apr 2016	109
Jack Carpenter	19 May 2013	23 Jul 2016	100
Vadim Virjassov	26 Apr 2015	9 Jun 2018	94
Daniel Pataky	6 Aug 2016		88
Mathew Lindsay	16 Jun 2013	19 Jun 2016	87
Robert Malloy	13 Jul 2014	23 Jul 2017	87
Austin McKenzie	19 Apr 2014	30 Apr 2017	85
Zachary Boyle	20 May 2017		77
John Kennedy Jr.	28 Apr 2012	26 Jul 2014	72
Patrick Nadin	18 Jun 2017		70
Patrick Nadin	25 Apr 2015	10 Jun 2017	69
Liam Manwarring	6 May 2017	29 Jun 2019	67
Thomas Powell	19 Apr 2014	29 May 2016	66
Benjamin Breault	13 May 2017	29 Jun 2019	66
Greg Oddy	16 Jun 2012	27 Jul 2014	64
Jeremy Brücker	22 Jul 2017		64

A couple of cool facts that have come out of this exercise and looking at the results:

• Both Jordan Kyros and Samuel Wilson’s streaks began on the same day – Perth Thunder’s first AIHL game
• Kai Miettinen’s streak began as a Canberra Knight and ended as a CBR Brave.  John Kennedy Jr also started as a Knight, but ended as a Northstar
• Brian Funes missed the first two games of the 2018 season, breaking his streak at 111.  He has since gone on a new streak of 54 games, meaning if he didn’t miss those two games, he would hold the record.  However, the game dates align pretty closely with the 2018 IIHF tournament, where Brian was representing Australia.  That’s a very good reason to break a streak.
• Daniel Pataky has the longest current streak in the League, followed by Zach Boyle, Patrick Nadin and Jeremy Brücker
• Nadin is the only player in the Top 20 twice.  He missed a single game on 16th of June, 2017, and if he hadn’t he’d be just one game away from tying the record
• Like Brian Funes, Tommy Powell was representing Australia in an IIHF tournament when he missed the Ice game on the 12th of April, 2014, otherwise Tommy’s streak would be 91 games.

Near the bottom of the list is AIHL legend Greg Oddy, and here’s the I refer to the asterisk in the title.  My database only holds detailed information from the start of the 2012 season forward, and I expect there would have been some pretty good iron man streaks prior to then.  However, some games of this era were played as “double-points”, so would records count that as a single game (as played) or two games (as awarded)?  I also cannot ensure accuracy across the number of games played each season – even within the timeframe I use, there are discrepancies in the number of games each team played (remember the bus crash Adelaide had in 2014, stopping them from playing against the Brave and Bears?)  As the database only has summary information for seasons prior to 2012, I can only speculate on prior results.

At the very least, we now have a target for Daniel to aim for.  He just has to stay healthy and not miss a game until the end of the 2024 season to take over the record.